


Transmission Impossible

by FroldGapp



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Body Horror, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, Hurt Keith (Voltron), Keith (Voltron) Whump, Keith (Voltron) is a Mess, M/M, Pre-Kerberos Mission, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Bond, SHEITH - Freeform, if ya looking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 15:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12213888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FroldGapp/pseuds/FroldGapp
Summary: 'A galra cannot live a natural life alone.'Isolation can do funny things to a person, terrestrial or otherwise.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Damnspider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Damnspider/gifts).



> Gift fic for wonder artist, damnspider who - following on from drabbles from my other fic, Billy Boy - wondered what effects Keith's isolation might have on him in the desert.
> 
> British English so ' and not ", etc.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gift fic for wonder artist, damnspider who - following on from drabbles from my other fic, Bully Boy - wondered what effects Keith's isolation might have on him in the desert.
> 
> British English so ' and not ", etc.

The changing rooms are quiet and dimly lit as Keith staggers in, exhausted from the uneventful but tedious reconnaissance mission with Kolivan. They found nothing. They so often find  _nothing._ Two light years forward, three back. Wearily, he drops onto a bench and begins unfastening his armour piece by piece. The black bayard lies dormant by his side.

Faint sounds of complaint reach him, and he realises groggily that he’s not alone. He investigates, peaking into each sterile booth, now in just his undersuit and breastplate. The kevlar-like collar rakes against the skin of his neck.

At the innermost booth, he meets a broad back, thatched with coarse purple-red fur that grows thicker on the shoulders and down the spinal column. The plait is undone, stark white hair pulled over one shoulder. The right hand moves a syringe filled with glowing yellow liquid testingly along the left arm, and it takes a moment for Keith-the-voyeur to understand what’s happening.

Kolivan is searching for a vein.

‘Um…’

When Kolivan startles, it takes all of Keith’s self control not to reel back at the sheer mass of the man.

‘Paladin,’ Kolivan pants, turning his golden eyes on Keith. He looks surprised to have been snuck up on, but is otherwise utterly unashamed to be caught in his ministrations.

‘Uh, hi,’ Keith says, wondering if ‘hello’ or ‘good evening’ would be more appropriate given that Kolivan is likely a hundred years or so his senior. He nods to the yellow liquid.

Kolivan considers Keith with a silent stare, his broad mouth pulled southwards in a frown. After a moment, he guides Keith away from the booth and onto one of the benches.

‘Quintessence,’ he says and Keith nods, he remembers the liquid-cum-magic all too well.

He leans closer, tilting his head to better study it. ‘What’s – uh – what’s it for?

‘In small doses, it can be used as a pain relief.’

Keith balks, eyes flitting over the expansive chest, thick arms, worn face: old scars, bald strips in the short fur, but nothing fresh. ‘Pain? What? Kolivan, did something happen out there?’

The man chuckles and cants sad, fond eyes to Keith. ‘No, Paladin. It’s to counteract the eggression shock.’

‘Eggression shock?’

A sigh. ‘A galra cannot live a natural life alone, Paladin.’ His eyes narrow ,and gently, he reaches forward with a massive hand to cup Keith’s face. Unthinking, Keith leans into the touch with a sharp inhale. Kolivan eases down the skin beneath Keith’s right eye and  _hmms_ deeply at what he sees there.

OoO

Keith’s face is obscured by the fog of breath on the mirror as he probes at the cavity in the back of his mouth. He makes a worried, keening sigh at the new, tender nothingness.

In the basin, the two remaining parts of a long-broken tooth lie in a thick pool of bloody phlegm.

It’s happening again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Catch me at https://froldgapp.tumblr.com


	2. Chapter 2

The spoon rattles to the floor and yoghurt skits across the uneven kitchen tiles. It takes Keith a moment to register what’s even happened. His hand hovers above the little bowl he’d been mixing his breakfast in, thumb pressed to forefinger as though the spoon is still there. He finds he cannot move his hand, and then with a muted gasp, realises it isn’t that he can’t move it, it’s that he can’t remember _how._

When he recovers movement, he dumps his breakfast in the bin and doesn’t eat for the rest of the day.

When he falls asleep later that evening, it’s to the tinny voice from his radio telling the world that they’ve called off the search for the Kerberos Mission hardware. ‘ _All hope of any salvageable matter is lost, says Garrison officials.’_

Salvageable matter.

Salvageable matter like the little pack of Go-Stop! stowed away in a jumpsuit pocket.

Salvageable matter like the tidy sheaf of post-its, one for every week of the journey; each carrying a terrible joke. ( _What did the alien say to the garden? Take me to your weeder.)_

Salvageable matter, like neatly trimmed nails. Like warm, dry, lightly calloused hands. Like dimples you could eat your dinner from.

OoO

The next time it happens, he’s getting ready for work: a part-time gig stripping flesh from pig spines in a pork factory. It stinks but it pays okay, and he’s not really squeamish. Sometimes he’s even gifted a few packs of poorly made sausages that aren’t fit for sale. He grills them out the back of his shack, and gobbles them with both hands, eyes open and searching, mindful of local wildlife.

Today he won’t make it to work. He’s forgotten how to put on his shoes. He stares, disbelieving, at his purple-socked feet. He picks up his right boot, turns it upside down, turns it right way up again, places it against his right foot. It makes sense, seeing foot and boot side by side, but when he moves to pull it on, he just can’t make it work.

He tries to call his boss, but discovers he’s forgotten his unlock code for his beat-up old phone. So he doesn’t call, but his boss does– later that day. _I’m afraid I have to let you go._

Keith is polite. He tries to thank his boss for his time, but the man’s already hung up.

The news has stopped talking about Kerberos. The world has stopped talking about Kerberos. Keith lies in bed and considers how he’s losing his mind.

He is so very lonely.

OoO

Old bread, discounted after the morning rush, and spread thin with butter. It’s barely sun-up and Keith sits on his porch with one leg folded under him. He shivers beneath his jacket, chewing mindlessly. A tin coffee cup steams beside him. Lazily, he bites down and something cracks in the back of his mouth. Blood rushes onto his tongue. He jumps to his feet and runs sputtering to the bathroom. He spits a tooth into the enamel bowl, a weak cry of alarm escaping him. He pulls back his lips to reveal an entire molar split vertically. The remaining enamel is black and rotting, the gum is peeled back to show the root.

He shudders and completes a few tight circles of his bathroom, unsure what to do. With no job, no garrison health care and no family to give a fuck, he decides to do what every good working class boy is expected to do; ignore the problem and get on with life.

Three days later, he peels off a sock and takes all five toenails of his left foot with it.

He keeps them, together with his tooth, wrapped in a handkerchief stuffed in his desk drawer. He doesn’t know why. _Salvageable matter._

OoO

He wakes with a start to the sound of his kitchen sink dripping. He tries to ignore it and focuses instead on the pale slice of light that turns his shit-show of a house into a monochrome postcard of frontier poverty.

‘Goddamn,’ he mutters, and crawls off the sofa, dragging his blankets with him.

He reaches the kitchen sink and yanks off the cold tap. Tottering back to the couch, he stops dead when he hears the tap dripping again. He grumbles, drops the blankets to his ankles, and stoats back to the kitchen. Both taps are dripping now, quite freely.

‘Okay,’ he sighs, and sets to work tugging both taps closed until the metal groans beneath his straining fingers. ‘Now stay– heugh!’

The cold tap handle flies off and a jet of cold water pounds off the ceiling, throwing spay across the kitchen. Keith is yelling his fifth or sixth word in a colourful string of curses when the hot tap erupts in the same manner.

‘Oh my god! Oh my God! Oh my God! What the fuck!? Oh my god! What the–’ The clang of metal and another jet of water sounds from the bathroom. _‘Fuck!’_ Keith roars and sprints the short distance there to find the bath and sink taps, shower and radiators all going off like a bunch of literal douchebags at summer break.

Stupidly, he tries to stem one of the five ‘leaks’ with his hands, but is only rewarded with a punch of water to the face when the stream shoots through his struggling fingers. Panicking now, he runs from room to room, slipping on the increasingly flooded floor. When the toilet starts gurgling, he decides enough is enough and flees into the night wearing nothing but his boxer shorts. He guns his hover bike, thighs warmed by the engine but everything else puckered with the cold. His nose is running. He wipes it with the back of his hand and almost loses control of his bike: an actual first. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but ‘away’ sounds about right.

Forty minutes later he finds the cave, and the wall paintings therein.

OoO

He goes back to the cave paintings. Lions, or a lion. Supple and grand, even wrought in simple scratchings. He stays sometimes for hours, sometimes for just a few minutes. He takes wall rubbings like an elementary school kid and brings them home, taping them to a crusty corkboard together with another part of a tooth that’s broken off. He is becoming Shaman-like; keeping totems and following his gut out into the savage wilderness. His hair is longer than it’s ever been. He uses an old Liverpool FC sweatband to push it back off his face. He’s never been to Liverpool and he’s never watched a football match from start to finish, but his desert playground is a lot like a desert island: things wash up.

His heart’s been palpitating badly after sundown for several weeks now, his muscles weak and shaky. The heart thing: it’s what woke him up The Night of a Thousand Leaks. Sometimes it stops altogether and he lies there gaping, wondering if his sad, struggling heart is trying to give him a mercy killing. But it always starts up again with a thump, continuing his sorrowful, spare existence.

OoO

He pisses against a dusty red outcrop on his way home, answerless still as to why he’s drawn time and again to the cave. When he finishes, he realises he’s written a word all in messy caps. The letters have started running and look like type from the world’s worst metal band. He laughs. All metal is bad metal.

The word is _PALADIN_.

He turns his head one way then the other, lips pursed. _Pal-a-din._

‘Lost on me,’ he shrugs, shaking himself dry.

OoO

The palpitations have become so bad that each time he’s certain he’s going to die. He knows he should go to a hospital. Maybe he has some chronic illness. Young people die all the time. They don’t need to be four and half billion miles from Earth for it to happen.

OoO

It’s only when his feet meet freezing sand that he realises where he is.  He’s so tired he can barely register the biting cold as he stands there in his boxers, eyes at half-mast. The cave lies in front of him, empty and inviting. The natural eaves gleam under a full moon. Everything is so still and so vast that he feels entirely un-present. A blip. An irrelevancy. A boy who could die and rot, hair blowing free from distended follicles and bones bleaching to white; nobody the wiser.

Whatever it is that’s been drawing him here seems to be reaching a kind of climax, by which he means, his delusions are getting the better of him and he should most definitely seek help.

‘Hello?’ he calls stupidly. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting to hear in response. If there were a response he’d probably shit his lungs out.

He bites his lip and sways this way and that. He feels drunk. He feels not entirely in control. A faint tug pulls at his sternum, gentle but insistent. He sees a desperate maw panting against perspex glass, paws scrabbling for attention. A rumble passes through his backbone, followed by a high-pitched mewling that pans through his head from left ear to right.

He shivers and turns back to his bike.

_Run! Come on, run!_

With a cry, he whips his head abruptly sideways as the sounds of rending rock and terrified screams blast into his ears.

‘Shiro?’ he whispers, and his voice is swallowed up by the desert. Another tug, like a string has been attached to his breast, his spine.

_We come from a peaceful planet! We mean you no harm!_

‘Shiro? Shiro?’ He trots forward on unsteady legs. The cave is cool and damp when he enters. His feet splash through a puddle. But it hasn’t rained in weeks. Months. White, sightless creatures scuttle away in fright.

His heart stops in his chest, and this time he’s certain he’s dying. He falls to his knees. His neck feels like it’s going to snap; his head lolling heavily backwards, full of white noise. Something whispers across his throat. The walls are moving. The ground is alive and pulsing with an awful force.

_PALADIN._

He collapses bonelessly in the shallow pool of water.

OoO

The sun slants into the cave and the edges of the puddle bleed inward. He’s staring at the ceiling of the cave. He can’t move. He shivers where he lies and tries not to think about the creatures tunneling their way through his soaking wet hair. In fact.

He glances down, half-blinded by his thick eyelashes, and sees a gangly spider unfold itself from his mouth and casually walk across his cheek and down his neck. He groans, terrified, and blinks away tears.

‘Help,’ he moans, his tongue thick and mouth ugly. ‘Help. Help me. Help.’ His chest shudders with sobs and spooks the rest of the creatures from him. ‘Help me. Help me! Help! Help me!’ He’s roaring, spit flying from his chapped lips. He can’t even make a fist, can’t bash his knuckles against the wet earth ‘til his skin splits and bones shatter. He can’t do anything. He can only wait. Just wait and wait and wait all alone, forever alone. Waiting forever for an impossible ghost. For Takashi Shirogane whose mindless, _corpse-less_ , body is scattered in the black ice of space.

_WRONG._

He lurches upright. He can move again.

But it’s more than that. He clambers to his feet and spins on the spot. He feels _full_ . He feels like a whole and not a husk for the first time in months. The cave paintings look on silently. He kicks up water at them, ignoring how the freshly grown in toenails sting. He’s laughing suddenly: Keith the weirdo, Keith the loner, Keith the all-too-literal space cadet. Laughing at phantoms, but, no. He _knows_ now what he has to do. He can feel the strange energy fall about him like a yellow-white shroud.

He’s laughing because he’s full, and fit, and _able._ And he knows, more than he’s ever known anything, that tomorrow a star will far to Earth and his life will never be the same again.

He races, still giggling wildly, to his bike and kicks on the engine. He has a lot of work to do. His skin bakes in the sun, but he doesn’t care. He can take the heat.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a working class gal. Keith speaks to me.
> 
> Get me at https://froldgapp.tumblr.com :)
> 
> NB: that terrible joke from a joke site! http://www.funology.com/outer-space-jokes/


End file.
